


Medical Thaumaturgy

by MotherInLore



Series: Slayers West [3]
Category: Always Coming Home - Ursula K. Le Guin, Slayers (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Crossover, Magic and Science
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-30
Updated: 2016-04-30
Packaged: 2018-06-05 11:56:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,057
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6703627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MotherInLore/pseuds/MotherInLore
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At the beginning of "A Man of Coyote's House,"  Zel and Wehisho are deep in conversation, and tsutsuji wanted to know more.  Here ya go, tsutsuji.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Medical Thaumaturgy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tsutsuji](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tsutsuji/gifts).



While she told them she was willing to take them into the exchange at Tuberhuny, Wehisho said they would be better off waiting until they could get to Choum-Rekwit or Sed. “The people here almost never ask the exchange about anything but weather. For anything complicated, you really want scholars.”

But until a ride north showed up, they were left to themselves. Lina spent the first two days napping on Gold Beach, then someone told her that it was called “gold” beach for a reason, and showed her how to use a shallow pan to filter out flakes of metal from the sand. After that, Lina spent most of her time trying to invent more efficient ways of getting at the gold, and dragooning Gourry into helping. The other three took to hanging out at the inn, instead. 

Zel could never remember later which of them brought up the matter of his curse, but Wehisho's response was, “I would like to understand better,” which was her response to at least seven out of ten things he or Amelia said. Unlike Gourry, she did at least seem to understand their explanations, though.

Zelgadis sighed. “I wish it was something you'd heard of before... something someone knew how to undo.”

“Well, if we can learn with each other, we might at least find new ways of looking at the problem.” And he hadn't been able to keep himself from hoping. 

Wehisho listened intently. She had to be told what a golem was, and what a demon was. The idea that someone could _use_ a “four-house person” seemed to disturb her more than Rezo's actions, though the latter certainly made her angry. Mild curiosity led Zelgadis to ask her to translate the string of Kesh swear-words that were her response to the moment of betrayal, and she did: “Foul, twisted-neck, murdering rapist.” Which was, Zel had to admit, pretty accurate. Wehisho sighed. “I know almost nothing about the kind of power you are describing. Would you allow me to look at you more closely?”

Mindful of the hovering Amelia, Zel elected to undergo the medical exam in his and Gourry's sleeping room. Wehisho kept it impersonal; she didn't ask him to remove anything more than his shirt, and her touch was precisely calibrated, indicating neither invitation nor repulsion. Zelgadis couldn't quite keep from twitching once or twice, only, he told himself, because it was so rarely that he allowed anyone to touch him.

“Are there particular changes, out of all of them, that you most want to undo?” 

How to answer that one? “I hate being a freak” he told her. “I used to be able to make myself invisible in a crowd, once upon a time. I've had reason to be grateful for this stone skin more than once, but it comes with a control spell that completely subsumes my will to anyone who uses it (It's only been Rezo, so far, thank the gods), and of course my sense of touch...”

“How has that changed?”

“It's dulled, just as you might expect. I kept breaking things the first few weeks. Only...” he hesitated. This wasn't something he'd ever explained to anyone. Most people wouldn't ask. _A chimera is a chimera, and that's enough explanation for almost everyone._ “I've grown more sensitive to temperature. I can't tell without looking whether your fingers are calloused or soft, but I know they're fingers and not sticks because of the way they give off heat. I can sense a person standing a few yards upwind of me from the change in air temperature, as if everyone were wearing perfume that I could smell. I... I don't know whether that's something the demon- or the golem- brought with them, or if it's more like a blind person getting keener hearing.”

“So it sounds like the stone bothers you the most? If you were still blue but could feel things again...?”

Zel sighed. “I don't know. If it were only skin-deep the golem part would bother me less. But that control spell...” together with one or two other things that he was not going to talk about unless he had no choice... “I don't know,” he said again.

“There is a test I would like to try, please.” Wehisho pulled a pair of calipers out of her belt-pouch, and pressed the points against his arm. “You can feel that?”

“Yes.”

“Temperature, or pressure?”

“Some of both. You've had that pouch up against your body so the contents are warm, but metal cools rapidly.”

“All right. Close your eyes, please. Now, here on your arm, do you feel one point, or two?”

“One.”

“And now?”

“One.”

“Now?”

“Two.” 

She tested his outer and inner arms, his shoulder, the back of his neck, his chest, his belly, his face... “Done. You can open your eyes, and if you wish you can put your shirt back on.” 

Zelgadis lost no time in getting dressed again. “What did you find out?”

“You are indeed less sensitive than most people, but like most people, it varies from one part of your body to the next. The parts that are more sensitive are also smoother. It doesn't quite answer the question I had about how it all works; I wish I had a microscope. Will your skin take a polish, or is it more like sandstone?”

“That degree of abrasion is actually painful, so I can't tell you for sure. But I'd expect my hands to be calloused, if I were human, and instead they're slippery.”

Wehisho made an ambiguous noise in her throat. “Well, maybe it doesn't matter.”

“What? What doesn't matter?”

“You see, I wondered whether this stone skin of yours is a kind of a crust, like a turtle shell, which is one kind of impossible, or whether it is blended with the other cells of your skin, like the barbs on a sharkskin, or a snake's scales, but much denser. That is a different kind of impossible. On places like your face and belly, either the crust is thinner or the distribution of stone cells is less dense.”

Another question that it had not occurred to him to ask. Partly because... “what do you mean by 'cells'?”

There followed an absolutely fascinating half-hour in which Wehisho explained basic Kesh medical theory. Zelgadis grabbed a notebook after the first five minutes, and they eventually made their way down to the common room again so as to have more room to spread out. Wehisho drew charts on the backs of some of his maps. It seemed the Kesh – or maybe it was the whole Omorn Peninsula, or the whole empire of the City of Mind (if empire was the right word) – viewed the body as a kind of community writ small, with each system of muscles, bones, and so on made of individual 'cells' that worked together to do things. These cells, along with other ones that the body did not make but instead grew there after being ingested or touched, worked more or less well together, and the degree of community was a measure of health. The intricacies of the system were so absorbing it was a jolt when Wehisho left off talking theory and tried to apply it to Zel's case:

“This community of cells is what normally stops it from being possible to just sew together parts of two different people, like grafting a tree. The Backward Head people in _Tavkach_ used to do it, so they say, a long time ago, but they had to kill the guardian cells to make it work, and so the ones who had it done were sickly forever afterword.”

Zel had thought _Tavkach_ was another swearword, not a real place. Not relevant at the moment, however. “That is not what happened to me,” Zel pointed out.

“No, it's not. So your foster-father-”

“Grandfather-”

“He had to do something to have the rest of your body work with the new pieces.”

“He used magic.” Wehisho's difficulty in grasping this was getting irritating.

“Which looks like what, to a cell? Listen, one thing I am wondering is why he chose to work in secret, then force the change on you by surprise, especially when he might have just as easily tricked you into consenting instead. Perhaps he needed that shock as part of his – 'spell?' The pain, and the panic of a broken trust, to persuade your brain and your guardian cells to accept anything that would keep you alive... a burning memory and a lingering fear, to keep the body remaking itself in a new pattern instead of the old, in self-defense... or did he somehow take your body's memory of the old pattern? That is what happens when a scar forms.” She looked up at him, her face changing from speculative to certain. "If you start feeling again, you _will_ get hurt again, you know. Perhaps never again as badly. You have to know it will be bearable, and it will be worth it. You have to know that as deeply as the other, or you will be fighting yourself."

He suspected she was not just talking about his skin. He didn't want to talk about that, though. How many hedge-healers had told him something similar over the last five years? It wasn't wrong, but what it usually meant was, _I have nothing but mysticism to give you._ “I really don't think the parallel with scar tissue gets us very far.” Zelgadis realized there was a bowl of succotash in front of him and took a glum bite. He'd really been hoping there was more to be found here than new reasons why he couldn't have what he wanted.

Wehisho nodded wry agreement. “Not far along a road that leads to hope, anyway. Once you've gotten past the first few ninedays, scars are very difficult to treat. Going backwards is dangerous anyway. You have to go on from where you are. Can you change yourself again?”

“Add more to the mix, you mean? I'd be afraid to try. Also, the only way to add more human would be to kill someone else, you realize.”

Wehisho's turn to look disappointed. “That won't work then. Not for you, and not for us, either.” She noticed her own bowl, picked up the spoon, and set it down again. “I don't want to diminish your suffering, but at the same time, for me, the idea of changing the map a body follows is very exciting, because we have the sevai and vedet, where the map goes wrong...”

“Wronger than this?” Zelgadis gestured vaguely at himself.

“Sevai involves uncontrollable muscle spasms, together with pain, trouble breathing, trouble swallowing. With vedet you get sensory and cognitive loss, so that not only do you go blind and deaf but also can't remember that your family is there to help you. And pain.”

“Wronger than this,” Zel admitted, feeling a little ashamed. He took another bite of succotash.

“It's a matter of scale. If there were some way to just take the map...”

“I take it the exchange doesn't have any advice?”

“The exchange says it is possible. But 'possible,' with the exchange doesn't always mean much. I asked it once how to treat a certain kind of tumor, and it told me all I needed was about a hundred unfamiliar chemicals, plus a machine the size of a _heyimas,_ and a year's harvest of some kind of metal from beyond the Range of Heaven that can only be gathered in the poisoned places, and a dozen more solar panels to power the machine – each one of those takes a year to build, too... you have to stop somewhere, you know? Or your head starts turning backward.”

“Yeah...” Zelgadis started to take another bite and realized his bowl was empty. When had that happened? The common room, he realized, was noisy with people eating, and Lina and Gourry had a stack of empty dishes in front of them that suggested they'd been stuffing their faces for quite some time. Amelia's voice by his ear was raised in a question: “Over there by the window. Isn't that...”

Gourry swallowed the half-pint or so of succotash in his mouth, peered around the stack of bowls, and waved, sunnily, “Oh! Hiya Xellos!” then went back to eating. Zelgadis groaned.


End file.
